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“How would I be doing this differently if I were willing to let it be easy?”–Alan Cohen

This is a great reminder because too often I make things much more difficult than they need to be. I don’t think I’m alone. In fact I think many businesses could benefit by getting back to basics,

If you are operating an online business always keep your customer in mind. The best way to keep your customer in mind is to go through the motions. Begin by searching for your product using the key words that come to mind. Did your site come up on the first page of Google, Yahoo or MSN? If not, how do your customers find you? Do they type in your company name? Unless you’re “AMAZON”, that’s highly unlikely. Most online shoppers will search using phrases rather than just key words, such as:

“Women’s Clothing”

“Ideas for decorating kid’s room”

“Crafts for Christmas”

It takes a lot of work to ensure your site is relevant and search engines will direct traffic your way.

When visitors arrive are they greeted with a pleasant, profession site? Shoppers will appreciate a clear and simple design, with easy navigation and access to help.

What is your first impression of your site? Is it cluttered? Too much clutter on the front the page will appear to be spam. Is it easy to read? Black letters on a white background is still the best option for legibility.

Some shoppers still have dial up access and if your site is budging with images it’ll take a considerable amount of time to load.

Can you quickly find what you came for? If not, is there an option to search your site, or a site map to assist visitors?

Once you find the product on your site BUY IT! Does your shopping cart operate correctly? Is all of the required information requested? Collect only the information you need to speed up the process. I have encountered sites where I wanted to buy something and couldn’t. Statistics indicate ~50% of customers abandon their shopping cart before making a purchase. A major factor in this is a poorly designed checkout.

There are also annoying forms that don’t save the information so if one required field is overlooked, you’re back to square one. When the purchase is complete, do you receive feedback that it was successful, such as a receipt or email confirmation? If you are using PayPal, you want to verify the funds were correctly deposited, confirm the transaction numbers, customer information and amount are all correct.

When the shopping experience is complete, what follow up do you offer your customers: a thank you message or a coupon for future purchases? If a customer is unhappy can they reach you and what remedies can you offer?

Walk in your customer’s footsteps through the entire buying process and eliminate any unnecessary delays. It’s just good business to get your site back to basics.

I think I am addicted to starting new websites. I have enough websites now to keep 30 people busy but I continually start new ones. I love to buy new domain names and if I have a great domain name I just can’t let it be I have to start a website on it. I guess there are worse things to be addicted to, but this really is a problem. It keeps me from dedicating the time that is necessary to maintain each one and they become neglected.

So what am I going to do about this addiction? I have no idea, but if you are looking to start your own website and don’t have the money to put everything together then contact me and I will gladly let you use one of mine. I have a few people who are running websites that I own the domain and provide the hosting. They get to monetize the site any way they see fit and add whatever content they want.

As long as they keep up with the site they can run them forever as far as I am concerned. I really have no use for this many websites, so take one of them over today and you can have a fresh startup without any of the costs involved. Meanwhile I will probably find another domain name that I just can’t live without and have a fresh idea that just can’t wait. I had better get some help for this condition.

I added a few articles to the site this week that may be of interest to anyone just starting out and looking for some advice on how to build a website.  The first article is a primer on setting up a plan before you actually get started building your site.  I think most people either skip this step altogether of just have a plan in their mind without actually putting it on paper.  I hope that article will help in pointing people in the right direction.

The second article is help with the first article and is about how to develop a linking strategy.  If you will follow the mind map outlined on that article you will reap rewards for years to come.  The article shows you how to build long term valuable links to your website and get paid for doing it.  That may sound funny to you, but there are 3 great site mentioned that will all pay you for placing your content on their site and build great links to your site.

The last article is for people looking for the best ASP shopping cart.  I have used VP-ASP extensively in the past and know it to be the finest shopping cart solution made.  In the article I have outlined some of the benefits of VP-ASP and hope you will consider using them if you are in the market for a great shopping cart solution.

That’s it so far but I hope to be putting up lot’s more articles for you in the very near future and always welcome anyone that has questions about marketing their site or building their site to drop in on the forum and leave your questions there.  I will get back to you as soon as possible and hopefully find a great solution for you.

There are 2 certainties about being a web developer that you can always count on.  The first is that you will have days of complete frustration.  The second is that when you actually accomplish something you will have to celebrate alone, because everyone else has gone to bed.  I have been having one of those days of frustration, trying to get a site put together.  It is one of those things that there just isn’t a simple solution for and getting everything to work just takes time.  I get a lot of satisfaction when it actually works, but when it is that hard to implement I am always weary of when it is going to break.  But like everything else we will just cross that road when we come to it.  I spent the better part of 2 complete days setting up a site that should have taken 4 hours or less and now that it is so far behind schedule it is going to have to wait some more.

Following will be the best advice I can possibly give to a new developer about how to make a website, and that is:  Don’t take on too much at one time.  If you are looking to build your own site and not someone else’s then build 1 site and that’s all.  Don’t ever think that you can build site after site and give them all the attention that they deserve because it is just flat out impossible.  Don’t take on site number 2 until site number 1 is not only up and running but is virtually self sustaining.  Not that there isn’t always maintenance and tweaking to do, but wait until you are happy with everything right down to the amount of traffic that site 1 is generating.

This is my personal site and I have a ton of fun with it, but it gets neglected way more than it should.  I had plans to have this site completed during the month of January and maybe I should clarify that is 2008, since at the rate it is going it may not be complete until 2009 or later.  But I digress, I am in the process of changing priorities so that this site and a couple of others can get the attention they deserve.  The funny thing is that once they hit that magical point you really don’t need to do much to them to maintain the traffic they get.  One of my blogs was getting right at 1400 visitors a day at the beginning or February.  The last post I made to it was February 2^nd and since then traffic has actually gone up to right under 1800 per day.  2 and a half months without posting to it and I have probably only seen the site 4 times since then and the traffic is increasing.  So keep heart if you are working diligently your time will come it is just a matter of time.

I often use test sites to test new software, scripts and ideas. To me it is essential to test things before you actually implement them on a working site. I know that it can be difficult for some to have this luxury, so I would like to extend the offer to anyone who is a member of netrat.com that I will set up a test site for any script or software you would like to try out before you implement it on your site. Or it may just be you want to try a new script to see if you would like to use it on an upcoming site.

The idea came to me today when one of our members Jinesh asked a specific question about a shopping cart function with Joomla. I set up the test site for him to work with and hopefully that will answer a lot of his questions about using that particular component of Joomla. Of course I am always here to answer questions but if you want to get some hands on with a new piece of software then just let me know what it is and I will do my best to get it set up for you.

Please make your request on the forum instead of emailing me directly. Forum post don’t get lost or put into the junk pile.

I started a new website today at footballrecords.org, so I thought I would walk everyone through the entire setup process and what I will be doing to market the site.  This will be a project for the fun of having it not for profit so I don’t mind sharing everything that I will be doing to get it up and going.  It started a couple of days ago actually when I decided after having problems with PHP-Nuke before that it had some features that I really wanted to use so I would give it another shot.  Well it was an entire day setting it up before I realized that users couldn’t register at the site, so I scrapped an entire day’s work.  But that is another story.  So I spent the entire day today setting up the site with Joomla, and it still has some bugs to work out but that will come over the next couple of weeks.

It is really funny how this one started, so I will start from the very beginning.   I am a member of the domain name aftermarket and received the regular newsletter about domain name and one of them for sale caught my attention because it seemed so overpriced.  It was footballrecords.com, and the starting bid was 5000.00 so I went and did a little research about the niche to see if it was worth the price.  What I found was 60,000 competition and about 1000 searches a day during the season.  And some other related searches that were okay.  Which peaked my interest just a little in the niche, but not anywhere near $5000.00 worth.  So I went and looked and found that footballrecords.org was available and unclaimed.  I figured for the 10.00 reg fee I would give it a go.  And since I am a football fanatic and also love hanging with sports fans I thought it would be one I could spend free time with and make it a super fun site.

I went with Joomla because I knew it had to have a huge forum for every team including the college teams and the members could contribute to making the site a success.  I started by setting up the standard site and then added the key components to it that make a community site a lot of fun.  First the fireboard forum because of what I said earlier.  Fireboard forums aren’t the easiest to set up when you are doing a ton of categories but the look great and work great.  Then I added community builder from Joomlapolis so that members could interact with each other in other ways besides the forum, and it has other great features that I will tell you about in another article.  Yes it really is that great that it deserves an article all its own.  I then added a video sharing component called Seyret.  There are other ways to implement video with Joomla but Seyret is a self contained video component from Joomlaholic that is super cool in my opinion.  Besides some other little tweaks that was all I really added to the site.  Of course setting up categories and adding videos took the rest of the day along with testing.

I put up a short welcome message and added a couple of posts to the forum and that was it for the site on day one.  The only other thing I did was write a hub for hubpages titled Dallas Cowboys forum and pointed the link to the specific Dallas Cowboys forum. That should give you a really good idea of how I will be marketing the site.  I will be using article marketing at hubpages and a couple of other sites and will be linking directly to the relevant pages on the site.  And then of course other general articles will point to the front page of the site.  I will also let you know what I will be doing to build other links into the site, and we can watch it grow together.  As of today 04/02/08 the seoquake toolbar shows no indexed pages and no backlinks which is correct.  And since this site is for fun and not profit I will walk you through all of the things I will be doing to promote the site, so that you get ideas how to promote your own.  Remember it doesn’t take money; it takes effort to make a site successful.  If I can pull of building a large community site right before your eyes then you will know for sure that you also can build a great site.